Upgrading RAID Controller: What's the Best Way to Handle Virtual Disks?

I’m about to upgrade a Dell Poweredge R320 from the S110 software RAID (with OBR 10 in one server, and RAID 5 in another) to a new Perc H710 hardware controller. I’m concerned though about losing the virtual disks that have been configured on the S110 controller, as well as the OS and the data. Am I going to lose this or can I back everything up, reinstall from scratch, and so on, and it should be okay?

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You should probably contact Dell Support for documentation on this process, and they can even send a tech to you to do the work for a charge. You definitely want to have a valid & current backup of the servers in case anything goes wrong. The next step I would perform is to shutdown the servers and install the physical RAID controller, but leave the disks connected the way they are. When you power up the server will find the new hardware and want to install the drivers - but the existing arrays are not touched so you don't have to worry about wiping out the existing data. Now you can shutdown the server and move the physical disk connections to the new controller, and this is where having Dell's assistance or documentation will come in handy. I know HP servers store some of the array config on the drives themselves, so when they move to a new controller the config can be imported - hopefully Dell is capable of doing the same thing and makes the change extremely easy. Make sure you have the Dell System Administrator software on the servers before all of this so you can see the health report of all the server components.

So your site does not have a disaster recovery plan or a method for restoring data from backups to new hardware?

Before making any major changes, I highly recommend you review your backup, recovery, and disaster plans as is sounds as though they are not complete. You will want to do this first simply because if this move to new hardware fails, you need to have a plan you can fall back on which you know works.